ANDREW Chalmers insists there is no point looking back amid suggestions that last season was a wasted one for the Bulls.

Many fans still feel the newly-formed club should have kicked off 2017 in the bottom division, rather than being handed a crippling points deduction to stay in the Championship.

Yet Chalmers does not believe that, in hindsight, immediate relegation to League One would have been more beneficial.

The joint-owner said: "It's hard to speculate with the emergence of the (legal) claim and impact it had on the players. We might have had the same result.

"We never had a choice about which division we would start in. We never had a choice about the 12-point penalty.

"That was the condition for a new club to commence. We just had to make the best of it.

"To be fair, without the penalty we won enough games to avoid relegation.

"Look at the way we played back end of competition – that's how I expected it throughout the season. We started like that but it was the middle 15 games that caused the problem."

Rugby Football League chief operating officer Ralph Rimmer told the recent fans' forum at Odsal that the governing body made the right choice to keep the Bulls in the second tier and dish out a heavy penalty.

"We had to do something which allowed us to stand up in front of the other 39 clubs and say 'this is why we did it'," said Rimmer.

"A lot of reasoning was behind what went on. It was meticulous and I'm very confident it stands up to scrutiny.

"There was a race run and once the club had been made redundant, some of the parties that came in weren't going to call it the Bulls and weren't going to play at Odsal.

"When (Andrew Chalmers) grabbed it and wanted to do something with it, we were ten days out from the start of the season.

"Everyone had put their clubs together (based) on where they thought they'd be. It would have destroyed not just one fixture list but several others as well."

Chalmers reckons the Bulls can storm through 2018 undefeated, even though they will be the scalp that every opponent will want to claim.

"The quality of the football will rise as a result of that," he said.

"Remember, we're not being relegated because we didn't win enough games. We're being relegated because we were given a 12-point penalty."

Ipsoregulated

This website and associated newspapers adhere to the Independent Press Standards Organisation's Editors' Code of Practice. If you have a complaint about the editorial content which relates to inaccuracy or intrusion, then please contact the editor here. If you are dissatisfied with the response provided you can contact IPSO here